New York Struggles as Blizzard’s Impact Chastens Bloomberg

Cars stuck in the snow on Franklin Avenue in Brooklyn on Tuesday.Credit
Todd Heisler/The New York Times

As New York City struggled with huge snowdrifts left by a crippling blizzard the day before, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg acknowledged on Tuesday that the cleanup had been slower than expected and the impact worse than had been apparent when the snow stopped falling.

While major thoroughfares seemed at least passable, especially in Manhattan, streets across vast stretches of the city remained untouched, leaving tens of thousands of residents unable to get to jobs and many facing long waits for ambulances and other emergency services.

Plows were unable to clear scores of streets that remained blocked by stuck buses and cars.

City officials pressed resources from several agencies to work, as a chorus of complaints from residents and elected officials arose on blogs and call-in shows. Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, who has often sided with the mayor, said the city’s response to the blizzard was the worst in memory.

“Clearly, the response was unacceptable,” said Ms. Quinn, who announced she would hold a hearing on the matter. “We’re hearing reports from all over of people not even having seen a plow by the afternoon of the day after. This is a level of lack of cleanup that I really can’t recall.”

At a midday news conference, Mr. Bloomberg set a more somber tone than he had a day earlier, when he assured New Yorkers that the cleanup was proceeding smoothly. On Tuesday, he said he had visited all five boroughs, and asked for patience as the city dealt with the sixth-biggest snowfall in its history.

“It is a bad situation,” he said, adding: “Nobody suggests that this is easy. Nobody suggests that this is pleasurable. But I can tell you this: We are doing everything that we can think of, working as hard as we can.”

His sanitation commissioner, John J. Doherty, said the department would not meet its usual goal of plowing all city streets within 36 hours after snow stops falling. Mr. Doherty said that he could not be certain when the work would be finished, and that some smaller streets might still remain impassable by Wednesday afternoon, more than 50 hours after the snow stopped.

Vito Turso, a department spokesman, said that as of 5 p.m. Tuesday, the agency had plowed 99 percent of the city’s primary thoroughfares, 76 percent of its secondary streets — those that feed into main arteries — and 52 percent of its tertiary roads since snow began. But many of those may need to be plowed again.

Mass transit limped back on Tuesday, as the area’s commuter railroads resumed limited service and airports began trying to move backlogs of stranded passengers. Two subway lines and dozens of bus routes remained out of commission. The city also grappled with many immobilized ambulances, fire trucks and tens of thousands of 911 calls since the storm began, many of them for minor troubles, city officials said.

As reasons for the snow-plowing delays, Mr. Bloomberg cited the storm’s fast-falling snow, and powerful winds that conspired to re-cover plowed streets. But he attributed much of the difficulty to drivers who tried to move their vehicles even as the snow fell hard on Sunday night and early Monday morning.

A shortage of tow trucks continued to hamper the effort, the mayor said. More than 1,000 private vehicles had been towed from just three main thoroughfares. More than 200 ambulances became stuck, some more than once, though all but 40 had been pulled out by Tuesday morning. Mr. Bloomberg said measures would be taken to prevent that from happening in the future.

“We’ve looked at some things that we probably could have done better,” the mayor said.

Some other officials were quick to criticize his decisions. Bill de Blasio, the city’s public advocate, said Mr. Bloomberg should have declared a snow emergency, requiring that parked vehicles be removed from major roadways, as the storm approached on Saturday evening. “I don’t think New Yorkers got a clear enough message,” Mr. de Blasio said.

Mr. Bloomberg told reporters that declaring a snow emergency would have led to more problems — though he spoke only of issuing an alert as snow fell, not before, when people would have time to respond.

“The snow emergency would require everybody on the main streets to move their car, and the question is, to where?” the mayor said. “All it would have done was put an awful lot more cars stuck in the middle of roads, which would have made plowing even more difficult.”

More questions are likely to be raised. The Council has scheduled a hearing on the response effort for Jan. 10. Some are already asking whether staffing reductions played a role in city plows’ inability to keep up with the snowfall on main streets during the storm — a problem that sanitation officials say kept them from starting on smaller roadways sooner.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

The budget for the Sanitation Department, which runs snow removal efforts, has increased to $1.32 billion, from $1.09 billion in fiscal year 2006.

But the ranks of uniformed members have fallen to a planned 7,016 by next June from 7,733 in 2006, said Doug Turetsky, a spokesman for the city’s Independent Budget Office. That is the lowest staffing level since 1997, though the number has bounced up and down several times since. The Bloomberg administration shrank the department’s uniformed ranks by 400 through attrition but recently hired 100 new workers and ordered the demotion of 100 foremen back into the ranks of workers, said Harry Nespoli, president of the Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association.

Mr. Nespoli said he believed that staffing should be increased, for just this sort of emergency. But he said the staff reductions and discord over the demotions had not slowed the city’s response to the storm. Rather, he said, the ferocity of the storm and stranded vehicles created special challenges.

“The day guys on Monday were having a hard time moving around because of stranded buses, cars and other vehicles,” Mr. Nespoli said. “That made for a slow start.”

In addition to the department’s 1,700 plows and the 2,000 workers it had on duty at any given time during the storm, Mr. Bloomberg listed numerous city agencies that were contributing personnel and equipment to the cleanup.

Another 70 private tow and 16 heavy-duty trucks were hired, as is common during large storms. But it was still not enough. The mayor said hiring private owners of heavy equipment had been difficult because so many companies were closed for the holidays.

As 911 calls poured in, Mr. Bloomberg said police officials had taken the unusual step of sending patrol cars to respond to calls for an ambulance, to provide coverage in case the ambulance does not arrive.

On Monday, there were 49,478 emergency calls, the sixth-highest total in the system’s history, said Paul J. Browne, the chief police spokesman. The most was during the 2003 blackout, with 96,660 calls; Sept. 11, 2001, brought the third-highest total, 55,574. Call volume was down on Tuesday, with 28,180.

Mr. Bloomberg said he shared the anger emanating from snowbound neighborhoods. But he also showed some irritation of his own, saying people’s perceptions were based largely on whether their own streets were clear.

“We cannot do everything all the time, and we are doing the best we can,” he said.

Street clearing remained uneven. Most streets in Upper Manhattan, from Harlem to Washington Heights, were cleared by noon Tuesday, though snow was still a problem on side streets where cars had blocked plows.

In Flatbush, Brooklyn, on Tuesday afternoon, a tractor-trailer blocked the intersection of Clarendon Road and Bedford Avenue, where it had been stuck since Monday. The driver, Alex Gonzalez, 30, said he was destined for a delivery in the neighborhood when the truck stopped.

“I knew it was going to be bad,” he said. “But when the company says you got to do a delivery, you’ve got to do a delivery.”

Around the corner, Wendell Thomas, 27, took the day off from work at Interfaith Hospital, where he is a janitor. “You can’t get a cab, you can’t get a bus,” Mr. Thomas said. “It’s like we’re held hostage. But we still got rent to pay. We still got bills to pay.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 29, 2010, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: City Struggles As Storm Impact Chastens Mayor. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe